Date/Time
Date(s) - 11/14/2018
5:30 pm - 6:30 pm
Location
Pinpoint Restaurant
Categories
Pam Toll “Twister” Oil on canvas, 30″ x 40″
Join us for a champagne toast and special reception at Pinpoint Restaurant to celebrate the visual narrative paintings in “The Familiar Distance in Going Home: Visual Narratives by Pam Toll” as part of our partnership with CHECKER CAB productions and local restaurants.
Enjoy the Fine Art of Dining!
About the Exhibit
My creative practice and visual language derive from a childhood steeped in family story telling. In these oral narratives, the men discussed the outside world – sometimes dark but often full of humor. Grandpa (Deputy Sheriff) Meeks delivered dark but true tales to the grownups, while my sister, cousin and I camped out nearby, listening but unseen. PaPa Wallace and his bachelor brother Floyd spun humorous stories about farming and animals and, later, vignettes about their adventures as high school janitors. The women delivered their stories while snapping beans, shucking corn or washing dishes. They covered birth and dying, and everything in between, and laced the details with gossip. Some of the women were like artists to me, working with thread, seed sacks and other found fabrics to make quilts.
These family narratives and experiences defined my childhood and are the genesis of this body of work. I set out to make a memoir, but soon the paintings develop story lines of their own. Using as source material family and my own childhood photographs (I received my first camera when I was 12), I constantly move among memory, myth, and the present, between the spoken and the unsaid, and between the conscious and the unconscious. Both photographic and mental fragments seem to swim in chaos, and characters come and go. At some juncture, the painting begins to lead the narrative, with intuition and intention resolving the various impulses. All that I am and know merge in the paintings, and I become the storyteller. ~ Pam Toll
About Pam Toll
Pam Toll, an Associate Professor at UNC Wilmington, received a BA in Art and English Literature from UNC Chapel Hill has been painting since childhood. Her studio is located at Acme Art Studios (Wilmington) which she co-founded in 1991, as a work and exhibition space for artists. She also co-founded No Boundaries International Art Colony (Bald Head Island, NC) in 1998, a residency program that in the last twenty years brought over 200 artists from around the world with the goal of creating a cross-exchange of cultures and artistic practices to share with our local community.
PinPoint is located at 114 Market Street in Wilmington, NC.
